Old Leather and Misdirection
by borogroves
Summary: Dean/Jo, set during season three.  Their last meeting and what it means to Jo.


_I'll call you later, okay?_

As the rain falls down around her _(drown me)_, washing away the shame, the _tears_, it's easy to pretend that it can clean deeper, sink into her heart and scrub away the knowledge that he was never going to call. As the rain falls down around her _(fix me)_, it's easy for her to pretend that he _will _call, that he didn't say it with that—however unintentional—tone of finality. That tone that didn't need to say the exact opposite.

It was that guy who had done it. That guy who had somehow smelt like Dean; that same almost indescribable mix of old leather and misdirection. He had sat at the bar, chatting amiably with her while she worked, flirting casually, checking her out when he thought she wasn't looking. It would have been easy, so easy to invite him into the dingy back room that she called her own _(moving on isn't an option)_. It would have been easy to let him undress her, touch her, fuck her... but it wouldn't have been fair. She would just pretend that it was Dean's lips on hers, Dean's rough and callused fingers in her hair, Dean's name she would breathe as she unravelled.

She refused the offer of a drink and maybe something more _(one step forward, two steps back)_, turning instead to the comforting solitude of her old, musty books and new, gleaming weapons that had yet to be used. With her cell phone on vibrate, she sat cross-legged on her sagging bed poring over those dusty tomes as she did each and every night, waiting for something she wasn't quite sure of.

The rain continues to fall long after she discards the half-smoked cigarette _(can't even remember how I started, now) _and sets foot back inside the empty bar, drenched to the very skin. She's still damp after the rough towel-dry and flannel pyjamas. She rubs the long, shallow gash running from her temple to her chin that's now scabbed over—the direct result of another not-so-successful hunt that had become someone else's job to finish. She winces at her own touch; the pain is enough, even without her own self-doubt and loathing.

Watching shadows play on the ceiling, she half-wishes, half-pretends that they're cast by the threads of a wished-for life. Not necessarily a life with Dean, but a life away from all of this _(taken out of this Godforsaken loop)_. But shadows are exactly that; poor representations of something she knows she would never be content with. The real question is: What _would _she be content with?

Her cell phone vibrating across the decaying bedside table rouses her from the sleep that's really just a light doze, unintentional in the first place, and it takes her a moment to register the fact that there is an all-too-familiar yet all-too-alien name flashing on the caller ID. She furrows her brow in darkness before flipping open the phone and putting it to her ear, answering in a shaky, sleep-choked rasp.

"Hey, Jo," a deep, quiet voice intones, and her heart gives a single palpitation, one moment where the sound of his voice sends chills through her and she's surrounded the dusky, _home _feel of the Roadhouse. She's falling, and the scent of old leather and misdirection is strong.

"Hey," she replies, sitting up in bed, not even noticing the spike of pain that shoots down the side of her face as she presses the phone closer to her ear. There is a lengthy pause on the line, and Jo wants to say a word that she has come to class as off-limits; taboo. In the year since she last saw him, she hasn't uttered his name once, and though she can taste those four letters on her lips, she can't bring herself to say them. She hears him clear his voice hesitantly.

"I'm... I'm sorry, Jo," comes the quiet admission. She settles back against her thin, lumpy pillows and she's suddenly ill at ease. There's something in his voice which sets her on edge, like she's expecting the worst, and she has no idea why.

"For what?"

"Well, I said I'd call you, and... I never did," he finishes lamely, not that he even needs to.

"Forget about it," Jo replies shakily. She's still feeling nervous at that tense undercurrent in his voice; the presence of which she knows he'll be trying not to betray.

"Look, Jo, um..." Dean mutters after a long pause, "I need to see you."

Seven hours later, her beaten-up SUV is parked alongside the ever-gleaming Impala and she's sliding into the front passenger side, slick from the rain that still falls in torrents, as if laughing in the face of the rising sun.

Awkward and stilted conversation washes over her, and that discomfiting, any-other-place-any-other-time relationship they once shared is very much a thing of the past. There are too many miles squeezed inside the few insignificant inches between them—those few insignificant inches that prevent her from reaching over and placing her hand on his shoulder where the scars of her handiwork no doubt reside. That piece of her that he carries, not so far from his heart.

He's grown unconventionally during the time since she last saw him. He's closed-off and drawn—he's grown inwards. It doesn't come as much of a surprise to her when he tells her that when Sam died, he made a deal to bring his little brother back _(always had you pegged as the type)_. She says nothing, only leans over and smooths out the lines in his forehead. She doesn't say much anymore, not since she walked away from him and into the scrub of Nebraska. She tries not to shudder as he whispers her name, full of desperation, need and promises that neither of them believes he can keep before turning his face to place a fleeting kiss in her palm.

Jo shakes her head _(can't look at you, not now)_, lowering her hand and choking back something bitter when he tells her that he's missed her. She feels like she's being pulled in fifty different directions by a million different things, but above all else she's shivering underneath those rough and callused fingers that are snaking around the back of her neck tentatively. It's his way of asking if she missed him too, if he's forgiven for never calling—it's his way of asking if he can make it up to her, the only way he's ever known how.

They're in a secluded spot; it would be easy, so easy, to let him undress her, touch her, fuck her. So she does, her sweat adhering her skin to the leather of the back seat. It's over too quickly for him, too drawn-out for her. She's wanted it for what seems like an eon, but it's just part of that something that's always been out of their reach. It belongs with that any-other-place-any-other-time relationship that they used to share. Now, they're hardly more than strangers with a history, and she knows it all too well.

Afterwards, she pulls away, and finally she knows why it never would have worked. Dean is the guy who will always be leaving before she wakes up in the morning, her eyes flickering open just as the door is closing—he reminds her too much of her father, and maybe that's the problem. She shrugs her thin jacket back on and ignores Dean's confused, pleading gaze _(you're not what I wanted after all) _as she gets out of the Impala.

As the rain falls down around her _(drown me)_, she realises that there's nothing left to wash away. It's easy to pretend that it can clean deeper, sink into her heart and scrub away the knowledge that soon, Dean Winchester will be dead. As the rain falls down around her _(fix me)_, it's easy for her to pretend that they could have had a life together—her working in some greasy-spoon diner and him fixing up vintage cars, only earning just enough between them to cover utilities and maybe a new shirt every now and then—rather than a brief, one-time thing that ended up doing much less for her than she ever thought it would.

She stands next to the Impala for a moment longer. What the rain _has _washed away is the night-time, and with it the hazy picture she'd built up—piece by piece, like a jigsaw—of she and Dean's relationship: what it was, what it could be. Only now, in the harshly lit wake of dawn does she see that she'd never looked at the picture on the box, and if she had, she'd have known that all along, she'd been missing more than half of the pieces.


End file.
